


the mountains slip into the heart of the sea

by pentipus



Category: Carmilla (Web Series), Carmilla - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, Bible Quotes, F/F, Murder, Philosophy, Sadness, Serial Killers, back story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-08-25
Packaged: 2018-04-12 00:02:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4457597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentipus/pseuds/pentipus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>14 because the life of every creature is its blood. That is why I have said to the Israelites, “You must not eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood; anyone who eats it must be cut off.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Leabag](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Leabag).



Some part of me always enjoyed it; their desperate pleas, “Mircalla, Mircalla,” their pleasant pants, “Mircalla, please.”

I always felt as though I should feel bad, the inextinguishable spark of humanity inside of me sobbing somewhere in the back of my brain, “No, no, don’t kill them, please, don’t kill them.” But I was desperate for them, for their hot blood against my tongue, cloying in the corners of my mouth, clotting thickly as I gulped it down with shuddering gasps.

I didn’t _like_ the killing, but I did like the killing. I didn’t want to see them suffer, but god, _I wanted to see them suffer_.

For almost two hundred years I woke and fed and slept and woke and fed again. A litany of victims spread open under my hands, their blood dripping through the gaps in the floorboards like spilt wine. I left their bodies across Europe for decades, a trail of white rag dolls leading back to mother and me.

In the end I grew tired of being beautiful, of speaking languages that weren’t my own, bending my voice to match those ridiculous sing song accents. I grew tired of cold bodies and the weight of death, of boneless limbs and marbled skin. I realised that the warmth of a body didn’t have to be fleeting, slowly cooling with each hard pump of a dying heart, I realised that I could hold someone and they could hold me back. Ell was the only girl I had ever loved, and even now I can still hear the blood rushing through her veins, speeding when we kissed. Hush hush hushing under my cold fingertips.

I went to church and stepped over the threshold like a sickness invading a body; I sat among the pews and asked for answers like zealots do, picking up the Good Book and flicking through the tissue-thin pages.   _You must not eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood_ , I had read, the bible burning slowly in my hands.

 _No more then_ , I had thought. _No more for now_.


	2. Chapter 2

I had watched the stars shift through the night sky for hundreds of years, some extinguished and others lit. I’d read that it takes so long for the light to travel from those distant stars that the constellations we see are not the ones that exist out there in the darkness; our stars are primeval ones, frozen in the past and presented to us anew.

Every night I would step out into that ancient light, shining down on my ancient skin, and walk the earth as an anachronism. The woman you see before you is not the woman that exists, the light that shines on me shows you a woman that died in 1698. Yet here I am today, the same but different.

For nearly seventy years I dwelt under the earth, trapped in an unending darkness, at the edge of space. I thought of Ell, decaying somewhere hundreds of miles away, her pieces leaching into the soil and becoming something else entirely. I wondered if I was dead again, and if the damp smell of earth and rotting wood was a hell made just for me.

It was a wicked thing for mother to do.

During what I later found out to be the 1940s I heard noises from above, just distant rumbles that told me that the world was spinning on as normal. One day the earth around me began to shake, my coffin creaking as a booming thunder grew closer and closer. I tried to imagine what the lightning must look like, but found that I couldn’t remember.

The final explosion had rattled me to the core, blasting away layers of earth and rotten wood and my own grey skin, my red raw muscles suddenly exposed to the moonlight. How little it had looked, how far away. The same moon but different.

I lay for a long time in the shell of my coffin, bleeding out under the night sky above me. I drew in great sucking breaths, one after another, until I felt dizzy with it. Eventually I started to drag myself from the hole I had lived in for decades, my fingers slipping in the mulch.

I could smell bodies around me, dead and dying, dismembered, decapitated, bleeding and gasping and desperate. I felt a hunger in me that I had not felt in years, my mouth watered, dripping into the dirt as I crawled towards the heaving body of a man wrapped in a brown uniform stained red. I fell upon the dying man like a starving beast, tearing at his flesh with my bare hands, sucking the blood from the hole I had made in his chest. I heard the crack of his ribs as I tore at him, and when I buried my face in the ruin of his body I felt his heart beat against my white cheek.

I dragged myself from body to body across the battle field as the bombs lit up the sky on the horizon. It was the nearest thing to sunrise I had seen in nearly three hundred years, and as my skin began to knit back together over my aching muscles it seemed to me the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

When the morning came I dug myself down into a shallow grave, exhausted and filthy with mud and gore. I waited out the day under the ground like an insect, before crawling out once again after the sun set. I walked on unsteady legs to the nearest village and fell to my knees in the little square, calling for help in a way that was all too familiar.

I had been a monster, and I was punished for that while I lived in the dirt. But I had read in the Bible that the Lord had formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. That man became a living being born from the bosom of the earth.

I would not be a monster again, I decided as I lay that night in the home of a stranger, a young woman who had rushed to help me from my knees in the village square, her fearful eyes darting about as she pulled me through the door of her home. I decided that I could change, that I could become something new. Frozen still, but different.


	3. Chapter 3

Five days after I emerged from the earth German soldiers came to the village where I was sheltering; we could hear their calls for almost thirty minutes before they finally arrived in the square. They set up a small base in the village hall, spreading out maps and radio equipment on the wooden tables, demanding food and fresh water and blankets from the locals.

I watched them unloading equipment from grey-green trucks, shouting to one another as they traipsed back and forth across the cobbled square. I sat with the woman that had taken pity on me the night I had stumbled into the village from the killing fields, warm inside her little house. Her name was Alba and she shook when she saw two of the soldiers walking towards her house, their rifles held across their chests.

“It’s ok,” I said to her, wrapping my hand around her forearm. “It’s ok, Alba, I’m here.”

I slipped away as they barged their way into the house, hiding in the space under the stairs, quietly cracking my joints as my furious stolen blood rushed through my veins.

“You’re to hand over any provisions that may help with the war effort, do you understand?” The men pushed their way into Alba’s little kitchen, tearing open the cupboards and pulling out jars of preserves, sniffing at the hunks of cheese and bread that they found. “It is your duty to support the troops.”

Alba said nothing, but I could hear that she was crying. I could _feel_ the shudder of the air around her as she trembled; a caged bird penned and terrified. I tipped my head back and closed my eyes as I tried to ignore the sound of her hammering heart.

“Is there anyone else here?” one of the men demanded.

“No,” Alba said quietly. “I live alone.”

I stepped into the kitchen as one of the soldiers stretched out a grubby hand and closed his fingers hard around Alba’s throat, his slow leer showing the yellow points of his incisors.

 _Yes_ , I thought. _Yes._

I left the bodies of the two soldiers on the floor of Alba’s kitchen, staring dully up at the stained ceiling. Alba sobbed into a white pocket handkerchief as I pulled myself up from the ground, my shoulders rolling back and my head spinning as their hot blood surged through me.

“Mircalla,” she whispered. “What-”

I touched my bloodied hand to her cheek and smiled. “It’s ok, Alba. I'm going to help.”

After that I walked out into the square and despatched the remaining forty-three Nazi soldiers that had marched into the village that morning. When I finished I stood among the bodies and tore at my borrowed clothes, desperate for the cooling air as my body heaved. I found a stiletto knife buried in the flesh of my abdomen and pulled it free, letting it fall to the ground.

Later that night Alba counted my injuries in the bath tub, her pale body hunched over in the pink water, her fingers pressing against the ragged holes in my dead flesh. Two bullets had torn through my left leg, while a third had hit me in the shoulder; I had a wound from a bayonet near the base of my spine and one of my eye sockets was shattered.

“You’ll die,” she said when I refused to let her patch me up.

I shook my head and pushed my wet fingers through her hair. “I’ll be ok."


	4. Chapter 4

Paris in the 1950s was bliss. Great white buildings in towering lines along the Champs-Élysées, the city’s streets spread out like a Chartes labyrinth around the Arc de Triomphe. I wandered the city’s backstreets at night, reading Sartre, Barthes, de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, my sharp kitten heels clicking on the cobbles.

I would whisper the things that I had learned into the ears of the men that I killed there, waiting for someone to wrap a thick hand around my arm in the darkness before turning sweetly in surprise and finishing them.

_It is not in giving life but in risking life that men is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills._

I was both, and yet I was neither. No longer a real woman, and yet I was certainly no man. I couldn’t create life, but I _could_ take it. I would bait them really, the humans, walking alone at night in the parts of Paris that smelled of opiates and ale and piss, the parts that a young lady shouldn’t venture to alone. There was always someone willing to take the bait, and I would feed off them greedily, smoothing my hands down the flat planes of their bodies, feeling their muscles spasm as they died beneath me.

This is how I justified murder after murder after murder, praying on the cruel, the wicked, and the weak. _Death transforms life into a destiny_ , I had read. _It preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time._

During the day I lived in the rococo splendour of a home that I had procured after taking the life of an aristocrat when I first arrived in Paris, bundling up his body in the boot of his own 1934 Aérodyne and sinking it to the bottom of the Seine.

It was a good life, I had decided. Not so bad after all.

In 1958 I travelled to Florence and stood in the shadow of the Duomo like a child, pacing around its great walls and touching my hands to the ancient stone. I felt young, suddenly, alive. My heart thrumming in my chest as the city bustled about me.

I travelled to Milan, Barcelona, Prague, and Bonn. I even travelled across the water to England, where I caught a train up to London and tore out a man’s heart on the banks of the Thames. I rung in the turn of the century in the bed of an English girl I had met there, the fireworks illuminating her dark skin blue and red and gold.

I left three days later when a blurry CCTV image of my face was broadcast on the local news.

“...wanted in connection with a suspected murder...”

And that was how London was finally scratched off the list.

In 2008 I returned to Styria, breathed in the dense air and set my intentions. I thought of the work of de Beauvoir and of the words I had read in the 50s, laying back on my stolen chaise longue, sipping a glass of stolen wine:

_I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept infinity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok so. I have a really short attention span, hence the short chapters, but we're up to modern day now so the actual story should start. Just to let you know, LEANNE.
> 
> I am on [tumblr](http://agent-carnter.tumblr.com) btw.
> 
> P.S. I cheated a bits on the dates of the quotes. Sorry.


	5. Chapter 5

In 2013 I returned to Alba’s village for the first time in seventy years. There was an anniversary, the local people celebrating the legend of the ‘One Man Army’, a story about how a single young man had fought an entire regiment of German soldiers during the war, saving the village from a small part of the Nazi occupation.

The bombed out square was now bright and modern; a Starbucks sat on the corner where the pharmacy had once stood. The cobbles were lined with trestle tables selling cakes and snacks, while a little brass band played music that I recognised fondly outside the village hall. There was a young girl flitting around, asking people for interviews in broken German.

“Were you a resident of the village at the time of the occupation?” she was asking one elderly gentleman, who shook his head with an apologetic smile.

“I was fighting the war,” he said. “You should ask one of the women.” _Frauen_ , he said.

The girl nodded, thanking the man and moving away.

I watched her quietly for a moment, this young thing. She looked like a child, her round face set like that of a doll. She looked like a cherub, like some heavenly little thing standing in the places where a devil once ripped through forty-three young men and left them shattered on the ground.

I shook my head before turning away, taking a breath as I walked across the square, towards the place where Alba had lived.

The building was still here, but the lower half had been turned into a tea shop, the living room where I had hidden that night now a chintzy room filled with small chairs and tables. I walked through the house and found the little kitchen, I imagined the dead bodies of the two soldiers lying there, staring blankly up at the ceiling.

“Good morning,” said a lady behind me. She was smiling, leaning around me as though I were lost. “You can take a seat if you like; I’ll come over to take your order.”

I sat in the far corner of the living room, next to the window where I had crouched with Alba to watch the soldiers rolling in and spreading across the dark square back in 1943. I drank a cup of hot tea and picked my way through a slice of dry Sachertorte, looking around at the twee interior, thinking about how Alba would have hated the useless little doilies and the coloured bunting strung around the walls.

The shop bell chimed gently as someone entered through the front door, then that same soft broken German inquired about the lunch menu. The young girl from the square was directed through from the hallway by the lady that had caught me in the kitchen, her hand indicating the free table next to me.

She sat so close to me I could almost hear the hot blood rushing through her, I could see her pulse ticking away in her throat, her hair tied up in a long, shining ponytail at the back of her head. She looked down at the menu with a frown, running her finger down the list of items. Eventually she got out her mobile phone and started to diligently translate each word.

“Excuse me,” I said in German, leaning away from my little table. “Do you need help?”

“Do you speak English?” she said with a smile that was almost shy, clearly embarrassed to have been caught translating with the bright square of her phone.

I nodded. “You’re American?” I asked in English, my accent dropping in to something a little broader as I spoke.

“Canadian,” she said.

I nodded again. “What do you want?”

“Er-”

“The menu,” I said. “What do you want?”

“Oh, something savory, like, a hot lunch or something.”

She settled on gnocchi, _Spätzle,_ I had said. Telling a lie about how my grandmother had made it for me as a child.

“Carmilla, by the way,” I said, holding out my hand.

“Laura,” she paused for a moment and then added, “Hollis,” as though this might be important for me to know.

“Your first assignment?” I said, inclining my head towards the busy square outside the little window.

“No, actually, I’m a reporter,” she replied, drawing herself up slightly. Trying to make herself look more stern, more authoritative perhaps. It didn’t particularly work, but the impulse was sweet.  “This is a passion project. I mean, I want to write a book. About the One Man Army, y’know, try and find the truth about it.”

“The truth?” I asked. “You don’t believed the story?”

She shrugged. “I’ve done a lot of research on the story and there are multiple accounts that claim it was a woman. A young woman.”

“You think that a woman could kill forty-three German officers without any help?” I asked, testing.

“Of course,” she said. “Maybe she was a specially trained operative. Or a spy. The accounts claim that the woman was a stranger and that she left soon after the incident. All kinds of things happened during the war, right?”

“Hm,” I nodded before continuing slowly, “You know, my grandmother lived here in the forties, she used to tell me stories about the war.”

Laura’s eyes became slightly wider, her head tilting towards me. “Really?”

“Her name was Alba Strauss, she lived in this building actually, when it was a house. That’s why I’m here.”

“Wow, well!” she said, beaming. “If you would agree to an interview that would be, I mean, that would be absolutely amazing, that would really be something!”

I smiled, showing the points of my incisors. “I’d be delighted,” I said.


	6. Chapter 6

We met that night, Laura Hollis and I, in a little bar that had had blacked out windows during the war, sawdust on the dirty floor. Now it was warm and homely, with hunting paraphernalia littering the walls and a great gaudy stag head hung over the open fire.

We sat on tall stools against the bar and I watched her wordlessly as she got out her notebook and placed it on the bar, leaning her elbow in a little puddle of some unknown liquid there.

“Damn it,” she said, pulling the sleeve of her jumper up to her nose to sniff at the wet stain. “Gross.”

I couldn’t help but smile, not wholly mocking but not wholly sympathetic either. She fussed with the notebook, writing a date and then crossing it out and writing my name down instead, underlining it twice.

She asked me questions about my parents and my grandparents, she asked me about the things I had heard about the war and whether or not I believed them to be true. Occasionally she would tell me her own little story, something she had discovered during the course of her research, and would ask me if it matched the facts that I knew.

“So there _was_ a woman here during the war, a stranger?” she said.

I nodded. “There were a lot of strangers during the war.”

“But at that specific time, there was a woman that came to the village and left shortly after.”

I nodded again. “My grandmother said that she needed help, she was badly injured.”

“And why do you think your grandmother never said anything about this woman, to the press, I mean?”

I tipped my head back slightly and felt my hair fall across my shoulders. “My grandmother had lots of secrets.” Laura stared on, waiting for me to elaborate. “It was necessary for her to keep her relationships very private,” I said eventually.

Laura nodded and she made a note in her little book, her handwriting purposefully illegible. “She was- I mean, she had a- an intimate relationship with this woman?”

“It wasn’t the done thing back then,” I said.

“Maybe that’s why the legend was changed,” Laura said to herself. “They wanted to cover her up perhaps.”

“Perhaps.”

I was hungry. In the big cities there was no end of victims, angry men and brutal boys, but in the country the pickings were slim. I looked around the bar, focussing on each person in turn, feeling the beat of their pulses through the heavy air like the vibrations of a bass drum. I looked back at Laura to find her writing in her notepad, doodling little cartoon versions of the people around us in the margins. My blood was thin and my mouth filled with saliva, I needed to eat.

“Laura,” I said, reaching forward to press my fingers against the white edge of her notepad. “Would you like to meet again?”

Laura’s smile was small, but it was open and honest. Her face was bright and I imagined a little halo like a crescent mood at her crown. “Of course,” she nodded. “I’d really appreciate that.”

I smiled back and felt like a monster, my dripping fangs, my ragged maw, my hunger like a possession.

I nodded. “Ok,” I said.


End file.
